She Was Nice, For A Killer

According to her friends, Dee Casteel was the nicest woman you would ever want to know. For a double murderer, that is.

"Without Mercy" is the somewhat biased account of Dee Casteel's drunken path to Florida's death row.

Although Gary Provost purports to have written the book to explore certain questions about the criminal justice system, it is apparent that he too bought into this theory that the murderess is just an ordinary person.

Rather than rely on court documents and trial transcripts, he instead bases his belief almost entirely on interviews with the defendant, her family and friends.

Unquestionably, the cast of characters is an interesting one. Dee, 44, worked as a waitress at the International House of Pancakes in Naranja, Fla., about 35 miles south of Miami. She kept a bottle of Scotch under the counter and had been fired from every restaurant in town because of her drinking. Although married and the mother of two young boys, she was especially attracted to James Allen Bryant, the homosexual lover of the owner of the IHOP, Art Venecia. Unfortunately for old Art, Bryant was in love with Henry Ramos and decided to get rid of Art and steal his money and business.

To carry out his plot, Bryant enlisted the aid of Dee, who just happened to know someone who might do the murder, a mechanic named Mike Irvine. For $5,000, Irvine and his accomplice, Bill Rhodes, slit Art's throat as he lay sleeping in his bed. And when Art's senile, 84 year-old mother kept asking for her son, Dee again hired Irvine and Rhodes to murder her, too.

Once he gets the details of the murders out of the way, Provost spends the rest of his book tracing the lives of the main characters. He devotes an inordinate amount of time to describing the drinking habits of these people, whom he frequently refers to as ordinary, middle-class citizens.

Unfortunately for Provost, he gets lost in his theory that alcoholism somehow excuses what Casteel and her buddies did. He seems to have bought into Dee's distorted claim that she was only minimally involved in these murders. By doing so, he ignores the fact that all of these defenses were soundly rejected by the jury that heard the case and rewarded Dee, Bryant, Irvine and Rhodes with the death penalty.

As a murder story, this one probably ranks on the high end of the scale for premeditation and cruelty. As an examination of our judicial system and the disease of alcoholism, it falls down on the job.